Time at War

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by Nicholas Mosley


  I wrote later in my diary that I was not afraid; that there were some lines of T. S. Eliot going through my head – ‘And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid.’ But I did not think I was: perhaps I was saying these lines like a mantra to stop myself being afraid – to put myself into the hands, as it were, of the eternal Footman. What has stayed in my memory is my taking careful interest in the crystalline formation of the rock an inch or two from my eyes; the taste of the ice-hard snow as I nibbled at it. How beautiful were these sensations! To be savoured as long as possible. At some distance ahead of me there was a genuinely wounded man who had dropped out from the line of prisoners and was lying in the snow; it seemed that he had been watching me and he was now calling out for me to help him. I wanted to tell him to shut up; couldn’t he see I was dead? Then I could see the German who had prodded me with his bayonet coming down the slope towards me; surely this time he would not just prod me. He had been decent enough the first time; was it not justifiable to shoot escaping prisoners? He came very close with his gun pointing down at me and I remember looking up at him: he was a big, healthy man with a round face. Then there was a thump and a bang, and he fell down. It appeared that it was not I who had been shot, but the German, who lay in the snow a yard or so in front of me. He grunted for a time, then appeared to die.

  What had happened, I became aware, was that Mervyn, coming up with the reserve platoon from behind, had seen the tail end of the prisoners being marched off over the hill and bringing up the rear a lone German who then branched off down the slope; so Mervyn had shot him – an extraordinary shot, I realised later, some 200 yards with a standard Lee-Enfield rifle. Behind my rock I waited till everything seemed quiet; then I stood up and waved; and after a time Mervyn, whom I had recognised, waved back. I set off towards him plunging through the snow.

  I could not afterwards be sure that the German would have shot me; but he would have had either to do that or to leave me; it was too late for him to prod me into the line of prisoners again; his colleagues were disappearing into the valley. And why had he taken such trouble to come after me, except to make sure that I was dead? I had certainly put myself in a position where he would have been justified in shooting me. So it seemed that Mervyn had saved my life.

  Some fifty years later, when Mervyn and I were having lunch together and talking of old times, I asked him – ‘But how did it look to you? Did you see me behind that rock? Did you recognise me when I stood up?’ And Mervyn said – ‘No. I’ve never told this to you or to anyone before, but in fact when you stood up I thought you were another German, and I had you in my sights. But then, I just didn’t want to do any more killing.’

  So perhaps Mervyn had saved my life twice: once by doing his most remarkable shot, and then by not wanting to do any more killing.

  I suppose it is inevitable that I should have come to think that by this incident my life was changed. Some half-hidden part of myself had emerged and rejected a part of the person I had been becoming – the part that had felt that war, duty, could be seen in terms of personal convenience. I had discovered shame; most unusual! And the demands of honour? Indeed, one does not talk about such things! But in my first experience of fighting almost the whole platoon for which I was responsible had been taken prisoner, and in a manner which I had once imagined desirable for myself. It was true that in the event I had gone to some pains and risk to escape; but then I had been saved by the grace of – what? – the skill, care, coincidence, of another? And so what should I learn from this? That if one risks what one feels is necessary then luck may be on one’s side? But would not one day some act of restitution be demanded of me?

  5

  After this there is a lull, both in my memory and in my diary; also apparently in what on a larger scale was going on. I do not think we stayed in the central mountains much longer; we were told we would be moving to a base area to train for the big push north in the early spring. There were rumours, even, that we were to be sent home for a rest: soldiers keep up their spirits by such stories. Then, in the event we settled in a pleasant complex of farm buildings near Capua, north of Naples, where we were to practise river crossings and close-combat fighting among buildings.

  I was aware that I was likely to be in trouble for the majority of my platoon at Montenero having been captured without firing a shot; even though I had contrived to escape. Out of a platoon of twenty-one men only six had managed to avoid capture during the original assault; the wounded man who had fallen in front of me had survived. A request for an explanation for this debacle came from Divisional Headquarters, and I wrote a report: the men had been half frozen; a mortar bomb had knocked out most of my platoon headquarters. It seemed that this was accepted, because I heard nothing more.

  But I was haunted by the fact that my platoon had not obeyed my order to open fire; although if they had, as my wounded sergeant had pointed out, we would probably most of us have been killed. So what was to be learned from this – the inadequacy of officers’ training which did not countenance the possibility of orders not being obeyed? The wisdom of men who saw the futility of an order that would result in their being killed to no good purpose? But morally? Militarily? My feeling of shame had been heightened by my peculiar personal history to do with my father. What would emerge from my impression that I had been somewhat miraculously saved?

  In the course of our training in the countryside near Capua I remembered what I had felt at Ranby – that for a junior officer to be on effective terms with his platoon what was required was more than a reliance upon orders; it was a two-way trust that had something of the nature of love. So I now set about fitting into the training programme of my platoon some of the stalking and catch-me-if-you-can games that I had played with Raleigh Trevelyan’s platoon at Ranby – for did not war seem to be a horribly over-the-top version of a children’s game? In these so-called exercises my platoon became known as being amazingly keen. In particular, we became the champion team at river crossings. I taught my crew in its flat-bottomed boat the canoeing chant from the film Sanders of the River – Oi ye o ko ho, or whatever – and we won most of our races. E Company, at the instigation of Mervyn, adopted a battle-cry – Woo-hoo Mahommet! – said to be the war cry of the Parachute Regiment. We evolved a private language, which replaced the ubiquitous use of the word ‘fuck’ with the word ‘waggle’; this had to be allied to a suitably insouciant style: ‘I say, just waggle over that hill, will you, and see if there are any wagglers on the other side?’

  One of the highlights of this time was when the Brigade had captured from the Germans what was supposed to be an amphibious sort of jeep; this was to be given a short tryout on the river. The brigadier and the colonel and whatever other bigwig there was room for squeezed in; they proceeded in a stately manner down the bank into the water and then straight on to the bottom. To the dozens of watching and cheering men this was a great boost to morale.

  My platoon was billeted in a large barn, and for the first time it was correct for me to live and eat and sleep with my men. The only concession to my supposedly superior status was that my thin mattress and blanket were set on top of a large chest like a coffin. When I was stretched out on this it could be assumed that I was asleep or no longer present; then the men could swear and grumble and carry on their ritual cross-talk. And I could listen and wonder about the nature of ‘bonding’; what might be called communal love.

  We were happy in our barn, but there had been difficulties in finding accommodation for the rest of the battalion. I wrote to my sister –

  I was sent ahead on an advance party to choose billets for the battalion – a most unpleasant job which entails throwing Italian families out of their homes and turning a deaf ear to the calamitous ululations. One old grandam who I bounced into the street had hysterics and I had a tricky five minutes controlling her convulsions. But accustomed as I am to family hysterics in all its forms, it was not long before she was resigned to her
ignoble fate. It is strange how unfeeling one becomes – I suppose it is just that one ceases to think in terms of pity and mercy; if one didn’t, tears would never cease to flow down harrowed cheeks. As it was the whole business was rather frantically funny – me hammering grim and gestapo-like on the door, forcing my way through the welter of pigs and chickens which live in the best rooms on the ground floor of all these houses; up to the swarming family who live in ‘orrible squalor in the attic; me ejaculating fiercely in French to an interpreter who passes on the information in even more flamboyant Italian. Then the racket really begins with the grandparents moaning in epileptic frenzy, the parents calling down all the heavens in wrath upon me, the children taking it as a good opportunity to scream and yell to their hearts’ content and have a good kick at anyone they see; and finally the pigs and donkeys and turkeys etc., who blare and cackle their ridiculous animal-grab noises up the stairs in disconcerting unison. But I, the stern jack-booted I, neither flinch nor relent.

  But was this funny?

  There were the usual rumours about what we were waiting for: it was now mid March and the big spring advance was held up. The Monastery at Monte Cassino, on its hill some thirty miles inland from the western coast, was proving to be an insuperable barrier. The Germans were said to be occupying it in force, though this was later found to be untrue. But they were dug in on the slopes and in the town beneath it, and all attempts in the autumn and winter to take it by direct assault had failed. The Americans of the Fifth Army had tried to bypass it by crossing the Rapido and Garigliano rivers to the south, but this had resulted in such heavy casualties that they had had to withdraw. A more ambitious plan was then hatched to make a large-scale landing at Anzio, some fifty miles behind the German Gustav Line, thus cutting off Cassino and opening up the road to Rome. The landing at Anzio had gone in on 22 January, but the initial success and advantage of surprise had not been followed up owing to timid generalship, and the Germans had been able to regroup. So it was now the forces at Anzio that were in danger of being pushed back into the sea, and there were calls for renewed attacks on Monte Cassino to prevent this.

  Assaults by the New Zealand Division and the 4th Indian Division were planned for February, but before one of the divisional commanders would commit his troops he insisted that the monastery should be heavily bombed. This was agreed by higher command; so the huge and beautiful eleventh-century monastery was needlessly flattened by repeated waves of heavy bombers, and the Germans, who in accordance with an agreement with the Vatican had not been within it, were now able to occupy the rubble and construct defensive positions better than any that would have been available to them before. So that when the New Zealanders and Indians did attack in February, both assaults were a complete and calamitous failure.

  The London Irish, standing by in Capua ready to exploit any breakthrough, heard rumours of all this; and were ready to believe, yes, that those in command could be so stupid. And then, in March, there was renewed heavy bombing: statistics later stated that 1,100 tons of bombs were dropped by 450 heavy bombers on and around the monastery and town of Cassino for three and a half hours – after which attacks went in with as little success as ever. The bombing this time had made it impossible for Allied tanks to get over the rubble on the approaches to the town and the Rapido river.

  General Fuller was later to write that the winter battle for Monte Cassino in 1943-4 was ‘tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless of the whole war.’

  The London Irish had been moved to a forward position by the river; we wondered if we were about to become the next wave of sacrificial victims. But there we stayed, because the tanks that were supposed to accompany us were stuck. Some time during this period I went back for a few days to a casualty clearing station for treatment for a bad attack of piles. This seemed symbolic. From the CCS I wrote to my old prep-school friend –

  I am in hospital, or rather I am clinging to a collapsible bed and 3 thick blankets while a tempest of wind and rain fritters about me. We are supposed to be sheltered by the tent, but that gave up trying after the first icy blast, and it is now a matter between the elements and the individual.

  There is one lonely figure here who has no boots. He was carried in on a stretcher weeks, months, perhaps years ago; but they carried him in with no boots. He was better within a very few days, but he had no boots, so he could not get out of bed to go away, and no one would lend him any boots. So he stays in bed and every morning the doctor comes round and says, ‘What is the matter with you?’ And the lonely figure says, ‘I have no boots.’ And the doctor clicks his tongue and takes the l.f.’s temperature and feels his pulse, and wanders sadly away. The Man With No Boots lies in bed and dreams of enormous galoshes and waders and wooden clogs, but they will never let him out because he has No Boots.

  The impertinent fools who are in authority in this place have seen fit to place me on what they call a Light Diet – an amount of food so indescribably paltry as would not satisfy one of the worms that operate in my stomach. But la! Once more is the Philistine confounded, for on either side of me are men suffering most horribly from malaria, who vomit food up as fast as they put it down, and I have, by a simple process of logic, explained to them how much more satisfactory it would be if I put their food down where it will stay and feed my worms, while they will be eased of the necessity to vomit. And thus I eat 2 men’s rations and my worms are surfeited (but my pile too for that matter). Unfortunately the men continue to vomit, but on an empty stomach, which is much worse, but I really can’t be bothered to explain any more to them; although I am afraid that one day they may vomit themselves right away, and then I will not be able to eat their food, about which I shall be very sorry.

  I recovered. I rejoined the battalion who were still waiting by the banks of the Rapido river because the tanks were still stuck. So we were sent into the mountains to the north-west of the monastery to relieve a Free French battalion who in the winter had outflanked the monastery from this side and had got as far as Monte Castellone, a rocky ridge even higher (2,500 feet) than the monastery hill and halfway round its back. But there the French had had to stop because the other attacks had failed. The higher command wanted to hold on to Castellone because from there one could look down on the monastery; but the Germans were on even higher ground beyond, so they could look down on Castellone, and any movement on it or to it could only take place at night. And even then the Germans were shelling the ridge and the approaches to it in the valley with great accuracy. And after we had crossed the valley there was a four-hour climb with mules to carry the heaviest equipment up a steep and rocky track. The shells continued but went whooshing over our heads on to the headquarters area below; but on the slippery track – it seemed always to be raining – mules were likely to slip and fall into a chasm, and if injured they had to be left with just the equipment being rescued. When we reached the summit of Castellone the shelling intensified and the French were, understandably, in a hurry to get out. This was the chance for a usual English grumble about French volatility.

  It was too rocky to dig trenches on top of Castellone, so just on the near slope the French had constructed shelters with stones known as sangers – about five foot by four by four foot high. Within each of these during daylight hours at least two men were entombed; any movement visible from outside brought on the shelling. Most of the shells hit the ridge just short of the top, sending up showers of stones, or went screeching over into the valley below. But once, I was convinced, one ricocheted horizontally off the roof of the sanger where my sergeant and I were huddled; bits of our roof collapsed, but there was no explosion.

  Rations could only be distributed at night, so during the day my sergeant and I would face each other eating stew out of a tin and at some point – there was nothing else for it – we would use an empty tin to shit in. There were the inevitable jokes: Can you tell the difference?

  My sergeant and I would stretch and flex our muscles, and sometime
s offer our opinions about our present predicament and the meaning of life. From the small opening of our sanger we could see the destroyed monastery above which even now dive-bombers circled like lazy wasps, then swooped down for the sting. My sergeant and I agreed that it was a terrible crime to have bombed the monastery; but if we were in command of attacking forces and we thought that bombing was going to save the lives of our men including ourselves then, possibly, yes, we would order it. I had carried a vastly heavy book up the mountain in my pack – I think it was The Brothers Karamazov. I read its convolutions with my body contorted to catch the scarce light.

  At night we had to go on night patrols, which did not seem to make sense because we could not go more than a few yards over the top of the ridge without danger of slithering into a chasm. The army had an obsession about night patrols, believing that they kept troops on their toes – which, in our cramped daytime conditions, was possibly true. So we would creep out a short distance over the ridge and find a suitable stone to sit on (I once found my ‘stone’ was a frozen corpse) and from there watch the firework display of tracer bullets and flares going on in the area of the town and the monastery. Then every four day’s we would go back down into the valley for a days rest and sleep – though the long climb down and back up the rocky path seemed to make the short break hardly worthwhile. After a month on Castellone we were relieved by a Polish regiment (with whom we professed to communicate better than with the French) and we returned to the area where we had been waiting before behind the Rapido river, where still nothing much seemed to be happening. But we were told that we could take turns to go on a few days’ leave and I chose to go to Maiori, on the southern side of the Sorrento peninsula.

 

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